Companies get a bad rap for violations of privacy, but governments are far nosier and use more covert tactics to find out what they want to know, a new study says.

“The Big Brother threatening privacy in Canada is not a company but the government itself,” argues Mathieu Bédard, an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, in a study released Tuesday.

Companies, he says, operate on the principle of mutual consent in their information gathering whereas governments rarely ask those concerned for permission to access their information. Smart consumers can also deactivate location tracking features or refuse to use a credit card online if they want more privacy.

And it remains more profitable for a company to hold on to the information it collects than to sell it.

Governments, on the other hand, do not give citizens much choice and often act in secret, the study says, adding whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrated in 2013 that nearly all online communication is intercepted by government without anyone’s permission.

Telephone calls, emails, video conferences and social networks are all regularly intercepted by governments.

Bédard notes journalists have recently discovered the RCMP has decrypted about one million private messages from Blackberry smartphones alone. The number of communications intercepted by the government has soared by 26 per cent in 2015 with no explanation.

“Several experts strongly suspect that the Canadian government uses instruments that capture the calls and messages of all mobile devices in an area, and not only those of people under surveillance,” the study says.

The study refers to a vast system of privacy violations by the federal government in particular.

“The federal appetite for our information has grown in direct proportion to the ease with which that information can be collected,” the study says, quoting comments made by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

“All of these revelations shatter the widespread prejudice by which companies are less respectful of privacy than governments are,” Bédard said.

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